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I suspect that either: 1) Your feeder isn't as strong as it should be or 2) You have a partial clog in the head (maybe some old PLA has turned to gunk on the inner wall of the nozzle). I forget - have you played with extruder spring tension lately? Also all you guys who talk about temperature and speed keep leaving out layer height. There's a huge difference between 50mm/sec at 220C with .2mm layer height versus .1mm layer height. In fact it's a 2X difference. But I agree that this sounds like the UM2 should be able to do a little better.

Um... I think this one is much better probably: https://github.com/Dim3nsioneer/Cura-Plugins/raw/master/TweakAtZ.3.0.1.py This one works better with multiple objects printed one at a time (where Z goes back to zero again) and I think comes with more things you can tweak.

Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. It is unrelated. It is uncorrelated. It's drumming to it's own beat - unrelated to the movement, unrelated to the retraction. You can dance to the damn clicking sound. Try listening to it and snapping with each click. Sometimes you will snap before, during, or after retraction depending because there is no synchronization between clicks and anything else. Sometimes there are 5 clicks between retractions, sometimes 6. But the clicks are as consistent as a metronome. One could write a song to the clicking or instead the movement sound, or the retraction sound - but if you try to make a song to all 3 it will come out more complicated than an African drumming pattern (they have complex rhythms sometimes).

Personally I would go with shapeways. I think they are probably much bigger than anyone else out there. There are some interesting sites that sell 3d models for non-printing purposes - some of these companies are probably bigger than shapeways as lots more people need models: artists, game designers, brochure makers, tv producers, and much more.

If you have excessive insulation between the heater and the thermocouple you should get a repeating cycle - like a sine wave. If instead you have a bad connection it should be more random and erratic. First of all - know that you can set the temp to 0 in cura, then set the temp manually on the ulticontroller (or in cura print window) and then it will print the moment you tell it to - not when it reaches temperature. The most common problem with temperature is a bad wire near the top of the print head. This is evident because if you push the print head to the 4 corners while hot it will get a mintemp or maxtemp error. But it sounds like you have a different problem. It sounds like your PID settings are off. Did you recently change the Marlin firmware or recently recalculate the PID values?

I also heard a story form a shapeways employee about some guy who keeps designing really nice, but illegal stuff. Things like ninja turtles, mickey mouse, minions, whatever is popular, clever, and unavailable anywhere. He sells like 10k the first 2 weeks, then 100k, then 2 million orders and suddenly disney or whatever notices, shuts it down, they cancel the last 2 weeks of orders and he only ends up selling 20k but makes plenty of money. Something like that. A strange, dubious niche market. Of course most of his things aren't so popular but sometimes he does well.

I met Bathseba a few months ago. I think she has moved back to the Boston area if I remember right. She has done very well on Shapeways. She is a "shapeways star". http://www.shapeways.com/shops/bathsheba She sells a lot of those metal klein bottle openers. I see them for sale in Scientific American sometimes. I think she has made quite a bit of money this way. I suspect it's hard to make much money through Shapeways unless it is "art" or jewelry. She also has cool laser crystals including the structure of insulin which is very nice: http://www.bathsheba.com/

And how big is the STL file? Cura has problems if there are too many polygons (it runs out of memory). A million or so polygons should be fine though I believe. And there are quick techniques for lowering polygon count without making the part any worse.

Very cool. And Marlin should slow down the overall feedrate if it can't achieve desired filament movement such that it just stops printing if it can't feed at all and automatically slows down if you requested too cold of a filament temperature for the current print speed.

For the UM2, at .1mm layer, 190C, 30mm/sec should be around the top speed although my table predicts 70mm/sec but I always cut these values in half because this table was printing in thin air. So at .1mm layers I would say 20mm/sec is a good speed and at .2mm layer 10mm/sec (15mm/sec top speed). This is all for a UM2. The UM1 can melt faster because of either it's feeder or heat chamber (not sure which). http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/3418-um2-extrusion-rates/

Yes. This. Then there is what you care about. If I am printing a part that no one will ever see and doesn't need to be strong I print it as fast and hot as possible (240-260C). If I want to keep stringing to minimum I print as cold as possible (190C) and very slow.

Most strong things are hollow inside or at least they can be. On my house, the plumber and electrician only cut holes through the *middle* of the studs and the joists. Never the edge. Light weight beams tend to have hollow centers. I beams have almost all the material at the top and bottom of the I. Tubes and pipes can be very strong. The drive shaft on my car is hollow. So... Making a part solid might not increase it's strength measureably. And solid parts have shrinkage/printing issues. Instead consider giving it a very thick shell or designing interior support exactly where needed for how the part will be used.

Yeah - you can do it - but it's confusing. Try selecting PLA, then saving, then selecting PLA again? It is very confusing how you save material settings. It took me many tries to get it to work but you can do it if you just push the right menu values in the right order. I think this should be made more clear. For example maybe it should say at some point "select material to save settings to:" instead of "select material".

I always save my gcode files and also the "profile" in a big "ultimaker" folder so I can always go back later and see what I did. Also I have a notebook where I write down the date, time, what I printed, and any settings not in the profile such as temperature. That way I can go back later. I look over this notebook much more often then one might think (e.g. last night I wanted to remember what temp I like to print nylon at).

Those clips that hold the glass in - one of those made a small cut. Was still bleeding a little 24 hours later. Had to wear bandages for 4 days.

90% of the time when a manufacturer says "3mm" it is actually "2.85mm". So if it isn't clear on the website, send them an email.

But again, the sounds you describe wouldn't occur when the XY steppers were stopped or during retraction *and* priming *and* printing. Also the frequency is regular - like a metronome whereas the printer is speeding up, slowing down, stopping, etc.

Recommendations on PLA change depending what country you are in. Could you mention that *and* add your country to your profile? http://reprap.org/wiki/Printing_Material_Suppliers http://diamondage.co.nz/?wpsc-product=3mm-pla-diamond http://www.faberdashery.co.uk/products-page/print-materials/crystal-clear/ Some PLA manufacturers are higher quality than others. There are many things that can make PLA difficult to print but the most important to pay attention to is the diameter of the filament - 3mm filament is usually 2.85mm. Sometimes however it actually comes at 3mm and if it has a small variance to 3.05mm it will get stuck in the bowden tube. Most printers don't care, but the Ultimaker design has the extruder on the back of the machine where it is compressed slightly "out of round". Because of this most printers can print 3.05mm filament fine, but not Ultimaker.

1) windows or mac? 2) You know you can go back to the older version, right? At least in windows you can. 3) There are 2 different "latest versions" - which one was it exactly? 13.12? The one here? http://software.ultimaker.com/ Or the newer one? 4) Do you get this error before you even load a model? Or does this happen when cura tries to slice? Do you still get the 3d view?

This sound happens even during retraction. It can't be the extruder. This sound even happens when the UM2 stops moving. I don't think it's coming from the UM2.

It depends what you mean by "overhang". If the overhang is too steep then heat makes it cool slower and it can droop as it is printed and make it a little uglier but at least it prints. For slightly less steep overhangs, the heat keeps it from shrinking and lifting up and keeps the head from hitting your print. PLA shrinks linearly based on temperature. Another way to say that is the density of PLA versus termperature is (mostly) a straight line. But the pulling doesn't kick in until around the glass temperature (50-60C) so if you can keep PLA above 50C it shouldn't shrink so much until the print is over (where it all shrinks at the same time and isn't as serious).

I think this is a bug that will be fixed soon. I usually just go to advanced menus and do "move filament" to make sure it is primed before I start a print.

enable skin never seemed like a useful feature to me. It added no more resolution and took longer to print a layer. It's still in version 13.04: http://software.ultimaker.com/old/

Actually I recommend 5.5 for UM2 and 4.5 retraction for UM1.

Just the fact that you are printing at temperatures well over 150C should be enough to sterilize anything in-between layers.